All About Berkeley Rep

Berkeley Repertory Theatre has grown from a storefront stage to a national leader in innovative theatre. Known for its core values of imagination and excellence, as well as its educated and adventurous audience, the nonprofit has provided a welcoming home for emerging and established artists since 1968. With two stages, a school and a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, Berkeley Rep is proud to premiere exhilarating new plays. In the last six years, the company has helped send six shows to Broadway. Seven more landed off Broadway, one moved to London, two turned into films and others have toured the nation."

This was Berkeley Rep in 1968.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre has established itself as one of this country’s top-ranking professional resident theatre companies, known for its consistently high-quality productions. Its national reputation draws theatre artists from across the country, just like you, to work on a variety of productions produced throughout the calendar year, with the official season beginning each September. Berkeley Rep’s artistic director is Tony Taccone and its managing director is Susie Medak.

Our Mission Statement: Berkeley Repertory Theatre seeks to set a national standard for ambitious programming, engagement with its audiences and leadership within the community in which it resides. We endeavor to create a diverse body of work that expresses a rigorous, embracing aesthetic and reflects the highest artistic standards, and seek to maintain an environment in which talented artists can do their best work. We strive to engage our audiences in an ongoing dialogue of ideas, and encourage lifelong learning as a core community value. Through productions, outreach and education, Berkeley Rep aspires to use theatre as a means to challenge, thrill and galvanize what is best in the human spirit.

The Ground Floor:  Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work seeks to enhance and expand the processes by which Berkeley Rep makes theatre. We strive to offer the most flexible environment possible for artists to come together and share ideas in person, to receive customized support on each individual project and to work together across disciplines. We will maintain an ongoing conversation with our audience and community about the work we are creating, and we will champion the spirit of innovation so inherent to Berkeley and the Bay Area.

Over the years, as we’ve increased the amount of new work we develop, it became clear to us that the regional theatre is very good at rehearsing and producing plays that have been done before and whose scripts are relatively set and fixed. But it is not set up well to foster the creation of a new piece of theatre from the ground up. No two projects require the same things, and the system we have now tries to shoehorn every process into the same structure. The Ground Floor aims to address this through a year-long series of commissions, workshops and a concentrated summer residency lab. We hope to incorporate a level of flexibility rarely allowed in an institutional theatre setting.

The School of Theatre: The Berkeley Rep School of Theatre serves 23,000 people a year in a wide variety of programs. Throughout the year, there are upwards of 50 unique theatre classes running during each 10-week session, providing 1,400 students of all ages and levels of experience with opportunities to study acting, improv, voice, movement, playwriting, directing, and more. In addition, the School features two four-week sessions of a Summer Theatre Intensive for teens as well as a two-week advanced Teen Actors Studio during the summer.

The School also offers a monthly workshop series for middle school students called Sneak Peek and oversees Berkeley Rep’s Docent program which provides pre-and post-show talks and discussions for audience members for each production in the Season.  There is also a very active Teen Council which is managed by the School staff and provides a forum for Bay Area teens to build a community, advocate for the arts, produce their own One-Acts Festival and see local theatre for little to no cost.

In addition, the School operates an impressive Outreach program that sends teaching artists into well over 150 schools throughout nine counties in the Bay Area each year to lead hour-long theatre-based workshops. The program also includes student matinees which brings hundreds of students to the productions at Berkeley Rep each year for special matinee performances, supplemented with study guides to help teachers integrate elements of the production into their curriculum.

Across all of its comprehensive programming, the School of Theatre is committed to working with local schools and community members to reinforce arts education as a community value and an integral part of the cultural fabric.